Comments on: Paranoia Anecdotes https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/61979.html
Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago boys including those pictured above.Mon, 16 Mar 2020 17:53:17 +0000
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By: Gavin Longmuir https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/61979.html#comment-1030802
Mon, 16 Mar 2020 17:53:17 +0000https://chicagoboyz.net/?p=61979#comment-1030802Andrew X & AVI — It is a possible scenario. Less likely than the Chinese over-reaction being due to the need to save “face” — but still possible. And secrecy is not necessary. There have been reports that the Panic Virus came from the Wuhan lab, but the Chinese leaders clearly understand that the entire Western media is interested only in things that demonstrate Orange Man Bad.

We in the West don’t understand much about China, but things we do know include:
1. Every Chinese school kid learns about the “Century of Humiliation” which began with England’s disgusting Opium Wars in China and ran on to Japan’s occupation of Manchuria. There will be payback!
2. China’s rulers have a long-range plan to re-establish China as the central nation in the world.
3. China’s history (see, eg, Sun Tzu’s “Art of War”) is full of the successful use of deception to defeat a stronger enemy.
4. The only real obstacle to China re-establishing itself as the Middle Kingdom is the US. Europe is a pitiful busted flush, and Russia has too many internal problems.

Now think about the objective of Total War — which is the destruction of the opponent’s ability to fight. In WWII, the Allies achieved the widespread destruction of Germany’s & Japan’s manufacturing capacity through about 2 years of intensive bombing. Because of nuclear weapons, kinetic war no longer makes sense — but economic warfare is still possible. In the last 25 years, there has been a staggering destruction of the US’s manufacturing capacity, largely through voluntary transfer to China, to the point where the US is now dependent on China even for medications.

China’s leaders understood that by over-reacting to the Panic Virus and shutting down their own manufacturing, no-one in the West would see this as an act of economic warfare and Western media panic-mongering would force Western politicians to do the same thing. The economic harm this is going to cause to the West is substantial, much larger than to China — and much larger than any health impacts. Likely, this will trigger an economic depression in the West. China’s rulers can then step in and buy bankrupt Western companies, and transfer the West’s remaining IP and machinery to China. Victory, without firing a shot.

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By: tomw https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/61979.html#comment-1030801
Mon, 16 Mar 2020 17:02:15 +0000https://chicagoboyz.net/?p=61979#comment-1030801It may be the alcoholism that eventually killed the Wisconsin Senator, Joe McCarthy, may also have reduced his effectiveness in espousing or explaining his claims. IMHO.
Have a few too many, and sentences that make sense and rational arguments seem a task too hard to accomplish.
He of course did not win many friends and influence many people. It may have been an excessive case of ‘gas lighting’, but I really don’t know as I was a kindergartener at the time.
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By: Assistant Village Idiot https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/61979.html#comment-1030758
Sun, 15 Mar 2020 16:26:59 +0000https://chicagoboyz.net/?p=61979#comment-1030758@ Andrew X – yes possible, and there would not have to be many in on the game. However, the number that would have to be in on it may exceed what is necessary for secrecy, even in China. The officials that have disappeared may not have known the whole story, but enough that their silence had to be assured.

I don’t think the Trump part is necessary. They don’t have to be that savvy about our electoral culture to be that precise. The Soviets, you may recall, were definitely conspiring against us and very good at keeping secrets – except their attempts at intervention were often clumsy or pointless. Paranoid people do not actually have good insight into others, because they can only project. The Kremlin succeeded at times by sheer volume.

If the PRC leadership is taking such a high-risk throw, it is likely directed more at their internal competition. The first fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 3rd C occurred because all the military leaders on the frontiers kept deciding they had a good shot at becoming emperor, and so brought their armies to Rome, leaving the borders little defended. Tribes repeatedly came across the Danube and the Rhine, and even though this was halted for a time, it eventually led to the actual fall(s) in the late 4th to 6th C’s. To each emperor, the fall of the whole empire was less immediately pressing than his personal. There was a 50 year period where they averaged a new emperor every two years.

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By: Andrew X https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/61979.html#comment-1030747
Sun, 15 Mar 2020 13:56:50 +0000https://chicagoboyz.net/?p=61979#comment-1030747Me the above. (Would be nice if your comment engine at least alerted submitters that they forget to enter name info. It’s all to easy to forget. Just sayin’.)
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By: Anonymous https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/61979.html#comment-1030746
Sun, 15 Mar 2020 13:55:05 +0000https://chicagoboyz.net/?p=61979#comment-1030746I have always prided myself in being a rabid, foam-at-the-mouth anti-conspiracist. I well know to my bones that 99.5% of the conspiracy nonsense that is plopped at my door is stone bull-shevik. Longest reason short, those who enter into a vast conspiracy, let’s just say here in the States, do so knowing that we are country of souls who cannot shut the hell up in general, and they do so knowing that that secret has to be kept until death for decades. Not a smart play.

I did say back in January or so that I was perfectly content to believe the Kung Flu came from animals in the market place, I mean it seems to have happened before, in China and in Africa.

Since that time? Two things —

— I am concluding that this virus was man-made, in Wuhan. Where those bio-labs are. Mother Nature just does not act like this, an epidemic this explosive. OK, maybe in 1666 or whatever, maybe that could repeat, but just in my gut it seems that this just does not “feel” natural to me. Takes that as you will.

So somebody in Wuhan screwed up. An authoritarian government losing control of technology that it rushes in to play with? The hell you say! So somebody screwed up.

— But wait. After a conversation regarding a very respectable person on such issues, I was confronted with this thought, that I now cannot escape.

The Chinese Communist Party was (is) in trouble. BIG trouble. Trump’s trade policies were starting to bite and bite hard (and are fully morally and economically justified… their political result, well…..). And Trump was looking pretty solid for re-election. Now they have Hong Kong, and THAT is not going anywhere either. Contrary, that is starting to spread in China like a…. ahem…. virus.

So what if the following conversation were had? “Folks, we are in BIG BIG trouble. This Party is doomed. There is no way out. And you, you, you and I will lose everything. EVERYTHING. We all saw what happened to the Soviet Communist Party. And there is no escaping it here. Unless…”

“Unless we change the game, BIG time. Create our own version of a meteor strike. We do that, and it will hurt us. Badly. But it will hurt the forces arrayed against us worse. And BTW, if we then turn around and accuse the Trump government of being behind it, we can count on the Western media to run true to form and march solidly with the interests of our beloved Communist Party. So there’s that.”

And our Western media happily confirms such thinking.

Talk about a thing that makes me go “Hmmmmmmmm”…….

It also occurs to me that this could have happened, and China’s President and top ten power boys could be innocent as lambs. How many people would it take to have that conversation, and then pull it off? Maybe as low as three or four people?

Hmmmmmmmmm….

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By: Mike K https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/61979.html#comment-1030680
Sat, 14 Mar 2020 00:49:48 +0000https://chicagoboyz.net/?p=61979#comment-1030680Harry Dexter White and Henry Wallace were not as sophisticated as today’s traitors are. The two Roosevelt comrades may even have believed that they were “on the right side of history,”as the saying goes. Joe Biden and Hunter and the other Bidens, plus Hillary and Bill, and probably the Obamas if the truth were known, are in it for the “Benjamins.” Kerry and the others have a life style to support.

Who cares if America goes down? There is the French Riviera.

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By: Jay Guevara https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/61979.html#comment-1030678
Fri, 13 Mar 2020 23:42:08 +0000https://chicagoboyz.net/?p=61979#comment-1030678However, it turns out in retrospect that the right-wing crazies didn’t know the half of it. Communist penetration of federal agencies was worse than even they thought. Alger Hiss was in fact guilty. The Rosenbergs were guilty.

It was even worse than that. Our lead negotiator at Bretton Woods was Harry Dexter White, the assistant Secretary of the Treasury, who turned out to be a Soviet agent.

There were a lot of indications that FDR’s second VP, Henry Wallace, was of dubious loyalty too. You don’t get much higher than these two.

I’ve disabused mongers of huge elaborate conspiracies by pointing out that at one point, only two people knew Clinton was getting beejers in the Oval Office.

Now natives in Borneo with bones through their noses know all about it.

The moral: everybody has a best friend. Who promises he won’t tell anyone else. Honest.

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By: Assistant Village Idiot https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/61979.html#comment-1030675
Fri, 13 Mar 2020 23:08:58 +0000https://chicagoboyz.net/?p=61979#comment-1030675Mike K – good practical point. We do that so automatically that I don’t even notice it anymore. We do it so subtly that students who have been on the unit 2/week for three months are surprised when we point out to them that we have engineered them into doing that.

Kirk, your example is an excellent one which leads directly to the hard questions that societies have to answer. Given that situations like yours do occur, and are horrible, how many suspicious people to we forcibly detain to prevent that? Needless to say, there are no “right” answers, only tradeoffs. Ugly tradeoffs, too.

My understanding of complexity has greater purity; yours is ambiguous and messy. A “paranoid”, or a “true believer”, only has to think on the immediate, “tactical” level. That is so much easier to do. Plus there is the comfort in knowing that someone, somewhere understands what is going on. If “we/I” don’t like the result, we need only replace “Them”.

Mao was deeply influenced by Trofim Lysenko and had farmers plant seeds up to six feet deep. It didn’t work out.

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By: Kirk https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/61979.html#comment-1030665
Fri, 13 Mar 2020 18:58:23 +0000https://chicagoboyz.net/?p=61979#comment-1030665What makes us human is a terribly fragile thing, and what keeps us sane and functional is even more fragile. Most people I know who’re “clinically paranoid” to the degree that they’re dysfunctional in daily life are damaged goods, in some way. There are various ways to get “there”, but the reason and manner of the damage is immaterial–You just have to be able to recognize the symptoms, and modify your behavior accordingly.

What’s bad is that the low-level stuff is impossible to differentiate from cases where it’s just that the parties demonstrating the paranoia are more observant and tuned-in than you are. Friend of mine back in the 1990s had an elderly female relative, who kept telling him that her middle-aged male neighbor was stalking her and wanted to kill her. They took her seriously, and did the due diligence, bringing in the cops and so forth. Nobody could find evidence, interviewing the guy made the investigators think he was a little eccentric, but harmless. Nothing was done, and as time went on, she got worse and worse. Nobody took her seriously.

Then, the other neighbors saw the middle-aged male neighbor out and about in the neighborhood, wearing blood-soaked clothes. Cops were called, people checked, and lo and behold, he’d spent the morning and most of the afternoon butchering (literally…) my friends elderly relative. They got him into a clinical setting, and he’s never been found (to my knowledge, anyway…) competent to face a courtroom for his crimes–Which turned out to be multitudinous.

Now, you tell me: Was she paranoid? The family certainly thought she was, until they got that phone call.

Turns out, though, that she was absolutely right. The neighbor had fixated on her, and was an actual danger. She saw it, nobody else did.

So, are we dealing with a clinical paranoid, who insists that Jimmy Carter is in the pay of some theoretical cabal of Saudi Arabian bigwigs, or are we dealing with someone who’s just paid more attention to things, and has actually done the homework? Which is it?

Good luck figuring it out. There are a number of things I’ve run into during my life so far that sure looked like the ravings of a lunatic, on first hearing, but which later proved to be things that were actually quite true, and my informant was just that much more observant and lucid when it came to perceiving those facts.

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By: Lincoln Annie https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/61979.html#comment-1030661
Fri, 13 Mar 2020 14:50:54 +0000https://chicagoboyz.net/?p=61979#comment-1030661I had an uncle who went paranoid. An old black man – named Solomon, aptly enough – said to him finally, “Marion, why do you think you’re so important that everyone wants to kill you?”

Ended up in Dorothea Dix.

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By: Gavin Longmuir https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/61979.html#comment-1030637
Fri, 13 Mar 2020 01:52:08 +0000https://chicagoboyz.net/?p=61979#comment-1030637It seems like there is an entire spectrum of behavior, from what might be considered “normal” to what might be considered “paranoid” — or possibly something else. For example, could the Iraq War veteran have been considered to be suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder rather than paranoia? As the old saying goes: “Even paranoid people have real enemies”; where should we draw the line between normal & paranoid?

I recall some conversations with a gentlemen who was performing well in a serious challenging job — normal, one would think. However, the man tentatively revealed he was homosexual and seemed to consider that the rest of humanity was ganging up to make people like him unhappy because of their sexual preferences. As far as I could tell, no-one else really cared what he did with his gonads — but he was undoubtedly personally uncomfortable. Some alcoholics are categorized as “functioning alcoholics”; could we have “functioning paranoids” too? And if so, has the definition of paranoia grown too diffuse?

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By: Mike K https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/61979.html#comment-1030635
Fri, 13 Mar 2020 01:12:19 +0000https://chicagoboyz.net/?p=61979#comment-1030635I’m reading a book by Tom Perkins who started the venture capital firm ” Kleiner, Perkins, et all” One of his failures was a startup by a guy they had worked with before but Perkins hadn’t checked out his history since their last project. The guy was increasingly paranoid and Perkins had him to dinner with Perkins’ personal doc. After the dinner Perkins asked his doctor friend what could make the guy like that. He answered, “Cocaine.” The guy had a $1000 a day cocaine habit.

Cocaine makes people paranoid and hyperactive, a bad combination,.

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By: Brian https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/61979.html#comment-1030629
Fri, 13 Mar 2020 00:30:38 +0000https://chicagoboyz.net/?p=61979#comment-1030629“However, it turns out in retrospect that the right-wing crazies didn’t know the half of it. Communist penetration of federal agencies was worse than even they thought. Alger Hiss was in fact guilty.”

Nixon helped prove Hiss guilty. The left never forgave him, or gave him a moments rest. The Hiss case was what gave McCarthy the idea to do his thing, but he was not nearly careful enough. The Russiagate lunacy is of course what the left always claimed Mccarthyism was, an insane, baseless, vile ideological smear job.

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By: BobtheRegisterredFool https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/61979.html#comment-1030628
Fri, 13 Mar 2020 00:29:57 +0000https://chicagoboyz.net/?p=61979#comment-1030628Yeah, someone I know found a 5G/corona virus thing on a blog, and I haven’t had time and sense to investigate looking for an obvious refutation.

In principle, if we haven’t tested a particular combination of power and frequency, there could be a frequency with an interesting athermal effect on some chemical. In practice, I suspect the theory doesn’t hold together if you pay attention to the powers and frequencies discussed. But I don’t know anywhere near enough about RF bioeffects to be completely convinced that it couldn’t compromise immune systems, and permit a mild virus to cause severe problems.

Trent: Corona virus reports/deaths wouldn’t happen to be statistically linked with places they have the towers up and running? I’m not sure how one would go about reliably controlling for people putting the things in densely populated urban areas at the current stage of spread of infection.